Is there any chance of running an article on how to create the icons, the set of icons, and the theme? I'd prefer it be for KDE, but understand if you need the article to be used by most window managers.

Would it be some of the more recent changes to the oxygen icon set (like the new folder icons) that are spurring your interest in this? If so, these are packaged (at least on openSUSE) in "oxygen-icon-theme-<KDE vrsn>-<pkg vrsn>.noarch.rpm" and for 128x128 and 256x256 sized icons: "oxygen-icon-theme-large-<KDE vrsn>-<pkg vrsn>.noarch.rpm".

These can be grabbed from a repository/installation disc and opened in your home directory for editing using the unrpm command. You can then replace the offending icons in the directories then repackage them in a tarball. This icon set in a tarball can then be installed by going to KDE's "System Settings" > "Common Appearance and Behaviour" section > "Application Appearance" button > "Icons" button in LHS scrolling pane and clicking on the "Install Theme File" button, at the bottom of the main window.

These two packages contain only png files, but I presume the icons started life somewhere as svg files, from which these png files were generated. There is a similarly named icon package with the word "scalable" in the name, which might be where the svg versions of the icons live, but I haven't checked this. You can always ask KDE development how they do this.

It's not that at all. Sooner or later I want to have a go at spinning my own distro. I wanted to give it custom wallpaper, theme and icons. I figure I can make that and apply it when I'm at the point of doing the distro itself.

I did spin a suse version. Problem is that a lot of the software I like doesn't appear in the suse repos. Plus I've been using mint / Ubuntu for about 5 years now and kinda like debs.

I was planning on a KDE distro based on that. With custom artwork and options installed at first boot. Lots of little tweaks, like py cashew to remove that piece of cr*p that is the now obsolete cashew (IMHO).

I'd be surprised if you could find something not packaged for openSUSE, unless it is really esoteric.

Have a look at their software search page: http://software.opensuse.org/122/en to see if you can find what you need. Version 12.2 might still be a bit new for finding everything you need, so check 12.1 too. Click on "Show unstable packages" after your search as this also includes packages built by the community. These are usually fine, but haven't been tested by openSUSE.